Nicaea to join us
Oh, the intoxicating euphoria of success. Last month, after my first effort at organizing my thoughts into a column/article/essay/treatise/manifesto/
thesis/screenplay/shopping list, I was absolutely swamped with a veritable tidal wave of emails jamming my inbox. Most of them were from disgruntled ebay customers wanting to know why their brand new, hand-stitched, Prada beanies had strange holes and smelled like tea. The other one suggested that I used far too many forward slashes and I should really not bother with the whole thing.
Well, I must admit that I briefly considering quitting, but then I said to myself, “I’m not a quitter. I’ll show them”. So here I am. I’ve even taken up smoking again.
And this time I’ve decided that I will talk about Paul. No, not the guy two doors down who plays distorted electric guitar at 3am and smokes just a bit too much pot. I’m talking about the Paul who founded the early Christian church and wrote a fair chunk of the New Testament. That Paul.
First, some background. Born Saul of Tarsus to parents Peter and Mary, he was relentlessly bullied in school, due in part to his strange middle name (of), but mainly his parents’ habit of taking him out of school for long periods of time and the three of them touring the Roman empire as a folk music act called Peter Saul and Mary. Critics were harsh and compared them to the Partridge Family.
Saul grew to become a well-educated and highly respected young Hellenistic Jew, but soon became a lackey of the Romans and an active persecutor of the early Christians. He was resented by Jews, who considered him a traitor, and avoided by Christians, who politely but firmly objected to him killing them.
One day Saul was on the road to Damascus to collect an outstanding appearance fee from the proprietor of an RSL club he played at on his last tour of Syria. Suddenly, he was startled to see a blinding, bright light all around him. Just as Saul was about to rebuke his manservant Grimshaw for messing about with the chariot’s internal lights he heard the voice of the Lord. “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He offered some lame excuse about defending liberty and spluttered something about what he called an ‘axis of evil’, but God was not in the mood for political semantics and Saul immediately fell to the ground, blinded.
Anyway, to make a lengthy account of an anecdotal narrative considerably less likely to be construed as anything other than diminutive in stature, Saul was converted. He changed his name to Paul and went on to become a great warrior for the Christian faith, founding many churches in Greece and Asia Minor and writing many apostles. Epistles. Whilst undoubtedly a prolific and enthusiastic author, Paul was criticised by his contemporaries for his cryptic writing style, as exemplified in the book of Romans. This ponderous tome, with its multiple narrative layers, baffling grammar, impenetrable syntax and effusive parambulism, is virtually impossible for the average reader to understand. Sheesh.
It was exactly these vexing issues that I raised with Paul when I bumped into him at the Council of Nicaea back in 325AD. I had been invited by Emperor Constantine to oversee the ratification of what is now the current canon of Scripture, but the hastily organized synod of prominent bishops was quickly hijacked by a troublemaking horde of ideologues and I was brooding by the hors-doeuvres table when Paul sauntered up to try the salmon pate`. I quickly seized the opportunity to query him about specific issues relating to his letters, in particular Romans, but he proved to be a difficult man to pin down and after he eventually pointed out to me that he had been dead for over two hundred years the conversation lagged awkwardly until I eventually excused myself to get an Iced VoVo.
As for the meeting itself, it was actually quite a dreary affair, punctuated by the odd row over such issues as the divinity of Christ and whatnot, until all hell broke loose when I put forward the controversial proposal that every copy of what we now know as the Bible be equipped with those little notches for your fingers that help you find what you’re looking for so quickly and easily. Predictably, Eusebius exploded in self-righteous anger and put on a disgraceful display of booing and spitting which was only matched in immaturity by Arius, when later in proceedings he repeatedly called out “booooor – ing!” during St Alexander’s admittedly tedious Powerpoint presentation on the history of parchment wax. Anyway, when the brouhaha over the finger notches finally subsided, Athanasius said that we had bigger fish to fry, at which point every bishop to a man put his hand up and claimed to be hungry, so I reluctantly suggested that we break for lunch, which coincidentally consisted of fried fish.
Frustrated, I left the conference room, stepped into the elevator and shared the ninety-two floor trip to the foyer of the Hyatt Nicaea with a slave sales rep and a bleeding gladiator. That was a long ninety-two floors and I didn’t take my eyes off the circumcision clinic advertisement above the door for a second, but I needed a smoke and when I finally stepped through the revolving door into the fierce Turkish sun I sighed heavily and lit up, glad for temporary respite from the ecumenical din above. That was when I saw him.
The stranger was dressed in a pinstripe Armani suit and carried a briefcase, which immediately aroused my suspicion, as briefcases were yet to be invented. The Ray-Bans were another clue that something was amiss with this guy. As he passed through the revolving door, I discreetly stepped in behind him and followed at a respectable distance. When he entered the elevator and the doors began to close, I casually leaped and slid on my belly for ten metres, jamming my arm in the door to prevent it closing. “Are you going up?”, I asked him from the floor.
He said he was, and when, after a tense and silent ride in the elevator, we eventually stepped into the corridor near the conference room, I confronted him forcefully and asked him what his game was. He said Uno and after I rephrased the question he came clean and said that he had been sent from the future by shadowy forces to unduly influence the decisions of the gathered bishops regarding the Bible and Christian doctrine and thus alter the course of history. I asked him where he got his briefcase. He said David Jones. I assumed this David character was an accomplice of his and pushed him for more answers but he grew agitated and said that his mission was too important for me to ruin and if he had to, he would use the weapon concealed in his coat pocket. He pulled it out and showed it to me. It was a croissant. “Hang on, that’s my lunch”, he said, and pulled a gun from his other pocket. I asked if I could have the croissant. He said sure, he’d had a big breakfast anyway.
When we entered the conference room again, the delegates were still engaged in the same tiresome shenanigans. This time they were taking a vote on whether the Book of Revelations should end with the words “Amen” or “To Be Continued”. My inner conflict grew as the hours dragged on and the suave newcomer in the Armani suit sidled up to the various bishops and slowly began to infiltrate the gathering. Finally, a show of hands was asked for the inclusion in the Bible, as suggested by him, of the Gospel According to David Hasselhoff. I could hide my feelings no more and was about to object, at the possible expense of my own life, when Robocop stormed into the room and shot the man with the briefcase repeatedly, blasting him backwards through the glass window and onto the street ninety-two floors below.
It was then that I woke up with the cat licking salmon pate` out of my hair. It was all a dream. Or was it? Well, yes, obviously.
As for Romans, I guess the moral of the story is… just read it again.
